Beef Goulash that wasn't.

I've come away from doing a Sunday roast just lately again and have been filling the gap with some lovely hearty beef casseroles and stews done in the slow cooker.  We've stew & dumplinged, stroganoffed and finally decided to Goulash.

I swapped from my favourite beef shin to beef brisket for the goulash.  This was for two reasons, a) because shin can be tricky to trim up, when your hands aren't so good at holding a knife for very long, and b) because I wanted the cubes of beef to be as uniform as possible, which is a lot easier to achieve with a piece of brisket.

The recipe called for some piquillo red peppers from a jar, which I will admit I didn't even try to find, as we'd already got a half a jar of char-grilled red peppers in the fridge that were looking for a home.  I also added some diced swede and Chantenay carrots, just to increase the vegetable content and with half an eye towards our five a day!


While I was rummaging in the fridge, I also found the remains of a container of anchovies left over from our home-made pizzas, so on a whim, included three of those.


The end result, which could be entirely down to the age and/or quality of our smoked paprika (which is very old/poor), came up as a very nice beef casserole but a Goulash?  Nope, it missed its chance there.


Hence, I haven't included the recipe I used here as it would be a misnomer to call what we had a "Goulash".


I'll just have to find some real smoked paprika (a trip to Waitrose might be in order) and try again.


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